live off (or on) the fat of the land

I wished that I was her, and that I had naturally curly hair and that I was an artist, living off the fat of the land, as it were, because it seemed totally alien to me that your family would ever support your own artistic inclinations.

Check the long lines at stands operated by nocturnal vendors, men literally living off the fat of the land, for clear indication of how many people confront-on a nightly basis-the outlawed practice of eating far too near bedtime.

Origin

People have been described as fat since Anglo-Saxon times. The English writer George Orwell said in 1939, ‘I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?’ Cyril Connolly echoed this in 1944 when he said that ‘Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.’ For some women fat is a feminist issue—the title of a 1978 book by Susie Orbach. The Bible gives us live on the fat of the land as a way of saying that we have the best of everything. It comes from the Book of Genesis, in Pharaoh's promise to Joseph and his family, ‘Ye shall eat the fat of the land’. Fat here represents an old sense of the noun meaning ‘the richest or choicest part of something’, which now survives only in this phrase. The fat is in the fire is recorded from the mid 16th century, when it referred to the complete failure of a plan. People spending time chatting in a leisurely way can be said to be chewing the fat. The origin of the expression is not entirely clear—it may have first been used in the Indian Army—but the most likely explanation is that it derives from the similarity between the movements of the jaw in chewing through fat or gristle and those involved in talking animatedly. See also opera, prodigal